… liking what it says?
There is a never ending conflict between the current nature of your self-talk and the nature of the feedback you receive from your different environments. Are you normal? Are you acceptable? Do you need to change?
Or do you need to change your environment instead?
Ever been ‘sent to Coventry’ - given the silent treatment? This is a standard social punishment technique. Or have you ever received negative feedback? Did it hurt? If it did: did the level of pain you felt vary according to who the person giving the feedback was; the social situation and the type of relationship you thought you had with them?
The reason we are vulnerable to feeling pain when exposed to this kind of thing is because the final stage of completing our internal emotional information cycles depends on feedback from sources outside of our control - ‘out there’.
We have a built-in need to express, and then receive positive feedback on what we express, in order to feel safe in our environment. The nature of the feedback matters to us. It decides things for us.
You cannot complete your internal information cycles, so achieving happiness, when your external environment is so hostile you are not even allowed to express yourself out into it.
In such an environment we have only two choices to make: do I stay and make my environment adapt to me, or leave to find a new environment? This decision is based on self-talk. Unless you are a young child, or an adult with some severe disability, no-one else but you can make this decision for you.
You have a problem when most of your self-talk is based on subjective memories of how others treat you, rather than your own self-produced objective understanding. Particularly when you’ve received negative feedback from those you see as ‘special’.
We let ‘special’ people into our inner world, attaching to and valuing all they say and do. Unfortunately we’re at a disadvantage if they do not behave likewise.
We open up our Unconscious to them, trusting they have our best interests at heart. Sometimes what they say and do becomes what we say and do to ourselves - it’s called brainwashing. Mental and emotional marination.
Allowing yourself to be mentally and emotionally marinated by the negative opinions of trusted others means after you’ve left their company you walk away thinking you are the negative environment who imposed yourself on them. This is often the cause of low self-esteem.
We need to be careful out there - but we also need to be even more careful in here too. We need to keep control of our self-talk.
In an earlier post I explained the Left Neo-Cortex, the thinking part of us, will not allow the transfer of information confirming a negative self-image. It remains stuck in the Right Neo-Cortex, keeping us emotionally charged up about it.
This is because a negative self-image means we are not in balance with our environment. All living organisms have a continuing need to know whether or not they and their environment are in tune - their survival depends on it.
We repeatedly send signals out asking ‘how am I doing here?’ and we need positive signals coming back or we start to question the imbalance.
The true measure of how successful we are in managing our internal world of information is decided by whether or not we, as a whole being, are being accepted or rejected in our external environment (socially and physically) and whether or not we can trust the feedback signals we receive from our own unconscious.
We want to know we are normal. A person who regards themselves as abnormal, in any way, is by default a more anxious person.
Expression
In the film ‘Castaway’, actor Tom Hanks plays a FedEx employee stranded on an island.
Discovering a washed-up volleyball he paints a face on it, calls it ‘Wilson’ and starts talking to it. In the character’s mind Wilson acts as a feedback mechanism and he’s so emotionally dependent on Wilson’s company he experiences genuine grief when Wilson gets washed away by the sea later.
At the start of the film we see Tom’s character concerned mainly with solving logistical and time management problems; he does not come across as a people-orientated man. As events unfold, however, we see the part of his nature that keeps him going is his emerging need to reconnect with people - he doesn’t just have conversations with Wilson, he also talks to a picture of his wife as if she were present too.
Have you ever spoken to someone not present? I have - particularly when clearing emotionally charged memories. I’ve had full-blown arguments with imaginary people; telling them exactly what I failed to tell them when I had the real-life opportunity.
I’ve achieved quite a few insights and cleared some very painful emotional responses doing that. Is this normal? For me it turned out to be essential. I know a lot of people who’ve used this kind of approach to resolve their inner demons - including a counsellor friend who cleared an emotional response by beating up her imaginary ex-husband with an imaginary baseball bat.
And, although this method was usually painful to go through, it allowed me to finally accept it was they, not I, who were creators of the unacceptable environments I had left.
We need to express, using whatever method best suits us at the time in a safe environment, in order to clear out our emotional baggage and accept our emotional process. It’s how we work. Quite often the reason people develop emotional disorders is because they’ve been brainwashed by a hostile environment, created by one or more other people, into repressing this need.
We can express in a variety of ways, but the two main types are Unconsciously and Consciously.
Unconscious Expression
Unconscious expression is all about energy release.
When you manage information in your Unconscious, through your feelings and your image-based Right Neo-Cortex, you are managing vibrational energy.
This energy projects outwards through your physical mannerisms, voice tone and behaviours. Do you have any personal habits you’re only aware of when others point them out? I have a few.
When I’m concentrating I tend to have a ‘Mr Sad’ introspective face. People sometimes comment ‘Carl, don’t look so sad’ and I reply ‘I like being sad, it cheers me up’.
If I’m walking somewhere with an intention of doing something I find meaningful I tend to lean forward a little bit - I’ve had colleagues refer to it as my ‘purposeful walk’.
As a child I would always have a red nose because if I got excited about an idea I would rub my nose furiously (looking like a rabbit cleaning itself) and I had a lot of ideas. I still have this tendency but it’s not as bad as it used to be; some folks think it’s due to heavy drinking but it’s not. Honest.
So if I’m thinking excitedly about something while walking towards it you’ll see me leaning forward with a sad expression sporting a bright red nose. All driven by unconscious energy.
We express unconsciously through all the things we physically do or don’t do. If a friend tells you three times they definitely want to do something with you but three times they don’t show up what are they really telling you? It’s their Unconscious expressing what they really want; overriding what they’re consciously planning.
If you were to point the difference out between what they’re saying and what they’re doing they might admit, perhaps emotionally, you’re right. Experience has taught me to watch what people do; rather than what they say - because our Unconscious energy is what decides the future in the long term.
I’ve also learned not to blame or point out these inconsistencies unless absolutely necessary - why bother? It just causes bad feeling on all sides.
Let’s say, though, that instead of people pointing my unconscious habits out to me in a playful way, as they usually do, there’s a real atmosphere of social rejection in which I am being punished, maybe being shouted at or ‘sent to Coventry’. What do I do then? To escape the pain of social rejection I may decide to repress my unconscious energies.
Repression of Unconscious Expression
We can tune into our unconscious energy and create different routes for releasing this energy as it arises - so if I know I can do this, and want to, I can find ways to change my current automatic physical responses by directing my expression of energy into other activities. For example, if a situation makes me angry on a regular basis I can take that anger to the gym and get a better workout instead of releasing it directly at the original trigger.
Alternatively, I can decide to use the energy produced to leave; avoiding the trigger creating the anger response in me. Or I could use the energy aggressively to tackle the trigger head on.
Trouble is, both the retraining and the leaving options take a lot of time and effort. I’m only going to do these things if I am willing to funnel the energy into achieving a new goal or if the pain caused by staying where I am is intense enough to drive me away. The third option, tackling the trigger head on, could involve negative consequences outweighing any benefits gained.
The last option, and its the option all people with emotional blocking disorders have taken, is to trap the emotional energy inside my body so I stop expressing outwardly altogether. I pretend the energy is not there. I try to fool my environment - and myself - in the hope my environment will give me positive feedback. This is ‘denial’. When the positive feedbacks still fails to come and the trigger keeps triggering my unconsciously driven response I am well on the way to being emotionally ill.
In any environment where the act of expression itself is rejected, no matter what form it takes, we are susceptible to looking at our unconsciously produced energies and, after deciding they are unacceptable for whatever reason, start trapping them inside.
Those of us who adopt the blocking option can become skilled at it, masking our external expressions to the point when we finally start to talk about our inner struggle with others who may have been around us for some time they think we’re lying.
A blocking person can seem completely calm and ‘together’ on the outside while living in hell on the inside.
The trouble with unconscious energy is it doesn’t just disappear because you don’t want to express it. It keeps attempting to come up for release and finds various alternative routes to try and project out of the body-mind system.
If we look at people suffering with obsessions, for example, their trapped physical energies are trying to escape through various strange images. The sufferer is consciously forced to see ever-repeating imagery wondering why on Earth they are unable to stop this from happening in their brain - they believe it’s a ‘thinking’ problem. It’s actually an energy release problem.
Once the energy has been released, simply by feeling the feelings attached to the imagery, the images disappear as a side affect (just a note here to say that although this is a ‘simple’ process it’s still a difficult and painful thing to do).
If you’ve opted for blocking, so repressing your emotional energies as a solution to deal with a long-term rejecting environment, your first step may need to be leaving the environment generating the need to repress.
Conscious Expression
Emotional outbursts occur when the unconscious, working through the emotional Limbic, overrides the restrictions placed on it by the master conscious controller of you - your Prefrontal Cortex - and projects itself unrestricted onto the outside world.
Outbursts are particularly likely to happen during the period of life when we are dealing with our most important life choices but at the same time lack the self-control mechanism provided by the Prefrontal Cortex because it is not yet fully formed and connected to the rest of our brain and body. This period occurs between puberty and our mid-twenties.
Up until then parents and other responsible adults need to act as the controlling mechanism (unfortunately it is also the time when when we are most vulnerable to the influences of irresponsible adults and the manipulative plans of others who can see our naivety).
The command to engage consciously with your unconscious signals, transferring them to your image and thought processing Neo-Cortex, comes from your Prefrontal Cortex. This part of you looks backwards at the incoming sensory signals like a rower in a rowing boat; deciding which signals it will pay attention to and which it will block.
It is the part of you that forms a judgement about your self-image and decides what directions you should move in to achieve a positive one. It decides which of your sensory signals will be forwarded on to your Motor Cortex for physical action to be stimulated.
Physical conscious expression involves talking; writing; drawing; and all your other deliberately planned physical actions. Nice, neat and appropriately packaged for you and others to accept and look at (unless you’re in an environment which refuses to accept your consciously controlled expressions and then don’t be surprised when unconscious expression kicks in and overrides it all again!).
What we need to receive, in response to whatever method of conscious expression we use (and we really do NEED this), is acceptance.
Unfortunately, because you can’t rely on other people to give you this, you need primarily to learn to give it to yourself.
When I was emotionally ill I distinctly remember the moment when I decided ‘I need to be more selfish - I need to give myself the absolute right, above everything else, to get happy’.
Once you decide to do this for yourself the next step is to stop tolerating non-accepting environments because they will wear your commitment to self-acceptance down.
Achieving Total Self Acceptance
I like dealing with people who have achieved total self acceptance because:
- they are congruent - what they consciously and unconsciously express match up; as a result of this …
- they don’t tell me what they think I want to hear; so they don’t fool or manipulate me and I can decide quickly whether or not I should invest in developing a common positive-feedback environment with them and if I don’t …
- neither of us feels bad about that - in fact we simply reaffirm our individuality and our right to be who we are. There is nothing wrong with not being suited to someone else or deciding not to share an environment of some form with them if you are completely unsuited.
Here’s a personal life example: an attractive woman I’ve known for about 15 minutes in total approaches me and asks me to take her back to my place in order to have sex. I’m taken aback by the direct nature of her approach and I suspect she uses this approach a lot and often gets the results she’s looking for. I don’t do this kind of casual thing myself so I just laugh it off.
She comes back to me a few weeks later, still interested, and asks me what I look for in a woman. I tell her ‘honesty - if a woman is honest with me that allows me to make a valid decision about whether or not I should get involved with her and I can’t complain if it turns out later she is exactly the kind of person she said she was’.
So this lady says to me ‘well, I’ll tell you honestly if you get involved with me you’ll find I’m not the kind of woman who sticks to one man and you’d have to accept I see other men for sex too’.
I thanked her for her honesty - and I respected her for it and still do (no, I didn’t get involved).
She was self-accepting of who she really was and so was I. When it comes to identifying what a ‘positive feedback environment’ looks like it doesn’t mean you need others to conform to your idea of who they should be. It means you’re allowed to be who you are.
Choosing and Creating Positive Feedback Environments
I had to get more selfish in order to heal from my emotional disorders. I had to be willing to end relationships I had long-term emotional commitments to because the others involved had got used to treating me without respect and as though there was something ‘wrong’ with me.
The only thing wrong with me was that I had put up with years of being treated as though there was something wrong with me! I had come to believe it myself - and it had affected me at the unconscious level.
If you are coming out with expressions such as ‘I need to toughen up’; ‘I’m too soft’; ‘I shouldn’t be letting these things get to me’ - it means you’re forcing yourself to stay in environments you’re unconsciously absorbing negative signals in and you’re trying to pretend otherwise.
We need to live in environments that support our individuality as a person; forget all the gender based prejudices; the shaming tactics and the social politics of it all. We are individuals foremost. There is no ‘should be’ when it comes to who we are.
If you are someone who has developed an emotional disorder as a result of not being allowed to express yourself in a rejecting environment it means your body is overcharged with emotional information and the environment you were in has convinced you your feelings are abnormal and you should not complete your own information cycles.
Normalisation
We need to express and gain acceptance so that we can normalise our experiences; name them mentally and let them go.
Imagine you’re listening to a five year old child talking to their teddy bear and when it comes to their doing the voice of the teddy talking back to them you hear them speak, in a deep teddy bear voice: ‘you’re not normal - I think you should see a psychiatrist. You’re not good enough to be playing with the likes of me; I think it’s you who should be locked up a toy box somewhere, not me’.
Would you think that strange? That’s the kind of self-talk people with anxiety disorders are inflicting on themselves. They need to find environments in which they can consciously express their unconscious world. They need to do this so they can bring out and ‘normalise’ their inner experiences as they finally complete their internal information cycles.
Regards - Carl
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